Medal of Honor

Remember when I did that "review" of the upcoming MoH game, like a year ago? Well I finally got the chance to play it. It was the first game I beat with my new PS3 and I think it's a good sign of things to come. The cover mechanic is nothing short of perfect. I could finally aim down the sites of a weapon and just barely creep over the top of cover to fire. I could also quickly bolt around cover to see if anything was there before I moved past my cover. It also kept me in first person view (Rainbow Six Vegas too you to third person and I felt that was overly cheap). You also weren't glued to the cover and you could take cover behind anything.

But the game wasn't perfect. I beat the campaign in about 4-5 hours, playing on the hardest difficulty on the first playthrough. I got at least 8 when I did this with CoD:MW2. But these 4-5 hours were the best of any campaign I have ever played, ever! It beats out Call of Duty 2 (which has held that ground and been that campaign for which I compare every other campaign to) in everything but length. A lot of the time I just forgot I was playing a video game, I felt like I was playing Airsoft or reading a really well done book. There were no over the top cliches and there wasn't the one bad guy that you killed at the end. Hell, only once did I enter a room with that "slow motion" thing that CoD has seemed to fall in love with. And I won't lie, I didn't like that part as much as the times I had to enter a room without slow motion. It really added to the adrenalin involved in kicking down the door. With most of the guns you don't carry a crap ton of ammo. (the SAWs are the only exception to this that I found). I liked how I had a few hundred rounds for my M4, and if I needed more I'd ask one of my team mates (who would only give you more if you were low enough. I guess the NPCs have Solid Snake's bandanna from MGS1 and they aren't keen on sharing). This was a good reason for you to keep the guns you started the mission with. I found myself ditching the M14 EBR and the shotguns for AK47s and G3A3s. Ammo was fairly rare for the guns you picked up off of bad guys, and your team mates couldn't give you ammo for a gun they didn't have (or an ammo type they didn't have).

Everything they did with the weapons I expect to be done with the weapons in any FPS. They got reloading right (I have a blog post on that so I won't go into it here), they got the ammo amount right (you have an extra round if you reloaded with a round in the chamber), they got the reload speed right (I mean that it wasn't too fast, but it wasn't too slow. It allowed reloading to bring tension, but not to take a year to do). There was one thing I never expected any game to do, and they did it. You can change the fire mode of most weapons (I can make my G3A3 shoot semi-auto or full-auto. Same with my M4, etc). I love this! But it has been done before, showing your character toggle to change the fire rate, yeah, I've never seen that done before. Hell, CoD has their M4 and M16 modeled with the selector switch on semi.

And lastly I want to compliment the dialog. This is one of the reasons I felt like I was there (or reading a really good book) and it was something I was really looking forward to ever since I read about it on that Joystiq review. The time spent in the Apaches is filled with a lot of com chatter. And every bit of it feels so real. To the point at which you can only guess what exactly they mean (though a lot of it is still easy to follow). it was the same way in the game with the rest of your team.

The enemy AI wasn't the brightest in the game, but I'm not bashing it. Far from it, I'm complimenting it. If I came around a corner and shot a guy, there were a few times where there would be another guy in the room, but he wouldn't have heard me come in and shoot so I'd be able to shoot him as well. Seeing as how he is shooting his gone, and not looking my way, it makes sense that he wouldn't have a magic sense to know where I was. But at the same time the enemy would flank me, and that would often lead to some pretty frantic moments of shooting. The AI killed me maybe 7 times in my play through. 3 times I got stuck on something, once I shot the hostage rather than the hostage taker, but the other 3 were pretty illegitimate kills. Where I had done something that probably wasn't the brightest thing to have done (or the AI did something I didn't expect them to do). So thank you AI team, you guys did an awesome job!

In short, I want more games like this. Please. And I'd also like to ask, why do people call this a rip off of Call of Duty? Is it because it's "modern"? Comparing this to CoD is like trying to compare a Michael Bay movie to a Steven Spielberg movie. Michael Bay will have everything blow up, and will have the pacing set to "balls to the wall" the entire movie. Steven Spielberg will use action and explosions like a chef will use his spices. Often enough that you know they're there, but not so often that they get boring and you know exactly how every other "dish" is going to taste. I'd also say that comparing the early Medal of Honor games to the first Call of Duty game wasn't possible because in MoH you had fairly bad AI and rarely had anyone on your team along with you. Were CoD gave you team mates and had you fight in a war for a change. I look forward to the next MoH game, and I hope they go the same route of getting veterans (and active duty personnel) involved in making the game, so as to keep it as real as possible. So hats off to the amazing team that made this game (as well as to veterans).

Wow, for once I did a "review" with referencing Valve or Half Life. As for random experiences I had playing the game, I really didn't have any. And I don't find "I took cover, leaned out of it and shot 3 people before ducking back in" that interesting to share.